Monday 31 March 2003 09.46 EST
First published on Monday 31 March 2003 09.46 EST

It's called Insult to Injury, and, coming after the Chapman brothers' gory homage in fake blood and latex to Goya's Great Deeds Against the Dead, no one can say they weren't warned.

This time, the enfants terribles of art have chosen to pay tribute to their hero by "vandalising" a rare edition of Goya's Disasters of War, one of the Spanish master's greatest and darkest works.

In a move guaranteed to cause outrage within the art establishment, they have drawn demonic clown and puppy heads on every victim in a set of 80 etchings produced from the painter's own plates.

The "rectified" prints - as the brothers call them - go on show next month at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in an exhibition called The Rape of Creativity. They bought them out of the £500,000 that Charles Saatchi paid them for Hell, a tableau of cruelty they created for the Apocalypse show at the Royal Academy from toy soldiers inspired by Goya's view of Napoleon's occupation of Spain.

Although they are both against the current war, the Chapmans say they are not making a statement about it. Insult to Injury is more about the inadequacy of art as a protest against war. Art can't stop wars, they insist, just as Picasso's Guernica was a "pathetic" statement in the face of the oncoming second world war.

"Not to be too glib, but there's something quite interesting in the fact that the war of the peninsula saw Napoleonic forces bringing rationality and enlightenment to a region that was marked by superstition and irrationality," Jake Chapman said. "Then you hear George Bush and Tony Blair talking about democracy as though it has some kind of natural harmony with nature; as though it's not an ideology."

They had always intended to "rectify" Disasters of War, "to take that nice word from [the film] The Shining, when the butler's trying to encourage Jack Nicholson to kill his family, to 'rectify' the situation."

The critic David Lee, the editor of Jackdaw magazine and another Goya fan, was uneasy about the idea.

He said the Chapmans "tend to do something stupid and then do something very interesting. I'm not sure which category this one falls into". He added: "What we need is a Goya now. He would have done something truly poisonous about this fiasco in Iraq."